Tuesday, August 14, 2007

So I went to Game Stop the other day and made a gem of a purchase: Rune
Factory for the DS. It's like Harvest Moon, with a little extra.
There's a little more story going on (albeit not much more) and along
with general agriculture you can also adventure into caves and do battle
with monsters. The greatest thing though, is the fact that instead of
killing the monsters, you can choose instead pet them into submission
and they will join your team to either farm alongside you, or kick some
ass with you.

If you're a fan of Harvest Moon games at all, this is one you
definitely need to own. If not, I would still recommend it to you. It's
fun and pretty addicting once you get into it. Sometimes I'll sit down
for a short stint and wind up playing for hours.

The stylus is implemented flawlessly making the gameplay simpler than
your typical d-pad, a, b, x, y control scheme. You can use the stylus
to kind of auto assign tasks to things. So instead of busting out your
cheap hoe and walking 1 square at a time mashing the B button you can
just click on areas of the field you want cultivated and go to town
using the stylus.

My only "beef" is that until you skill up your attributes enough in the
various areas you'll be repeating day-to-day you're going to find
yourself running out of energy and having to throw in the digital towel
early on an ingame daily basis. Also every now and again a typhoon
will destroy all of your hard work in the fields. The last 3 crops I
have planted in my fields have all been destroyed by typhoons meaning
you're sort of forced into cavern planting, which while enjoyable means
you have to travel back and forth to water your plants and harvest
them.

Other than that, everything about this game is well thought out and very fun to play. I give it 4 pimp slaps out of 5.